TRUMP PLANS

a 17-day break.

WASH­ING­TON — Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump — who once ques­tioned the wis­dom of tak­ing va­ca­tions — is get­ting ready to join the an­nual Au­gust ex­o­dus from the city he calls “the swamp.”

Trump to­day will be­gin his first ex­tended va­ca­tion from Wash­ing­ton since his in­au­gu­ra­tion. He plans to spend 17 days at his pri­vate golf club in cen­tral New Jersey.

The va­ca­tion is driven in part by ne­ces­sity. Ev­ery­one who works in the White House West Wing, in­clud­ing the pres­i­dent, must clear out by the end of the week so the govern­ment can re­place a balky, 27-year-old heat­ing-and-cool­ing sys­tem.

The White House hasn’t been an­swer­ing ques­tions about the pres­i­dent’s Au­gust plans. Asked whether Trump would leave Wash­ing­ton this month, White House spokesman Sarah Huck­abee San­ders said Tues­day: “We’ll con­tinue to keep you guys up­dated on his Au­gust sched­ule as those de­tails are fi­nal­ized.”

Al­though pres­i­dents have long taken va­ca­tions to es­cape Wash­ing­ton’s sum­mer heat, Trump in the past has ex­pressed his dis­dain for tak­ing va­ca­tions at all, even though he has spent sev­eral week­ends away from the White House since as­sum­ing the pres­i­dency.

“Don’t take va­ca­tions. What’s the point? If you’re not en­joy­ing your work, you’re in the wrong job,” Trump wrote in his 2004 book, Trump: Think Like a Bil­lion­aire.

So far, Trump has spent 13 of 28 week­ends while in of­fice away from the White House, mostly at his prop­er­ties in Palm Beach, Fla., or in Bed­min­ster, N.J., ac­cord­ing to an As­so­ci­ated Press count. The fig­ures in­clude a week­end dur­ing of­fi­cial travel over­seas, and Fa­ther’s Day week­end at Camp David, the govern­ment-owned pres­i­den­tial re­treat in Mary­land.

Trump told Larry King in an in­ter­view — also in 2004 — that “most of the peo­ple I know that are suc­cess­ful re­ally don’t take va­ca­tions. Their busi­ness is their va­ca­tion. I rarely leave. You know that. You and I are friends. How of­ten do you see me go­ing away?”